This is actually good news. Stacking the deck with all these Wall Street chumps means that recession we've been waiting on will happen sooner rather than later. Speaking of which, anyone got any tips for profiting from another major US economic meltdown that doesn't involve the stock market?

That, right there, is one very useful phrase, I'll have to admit. I've used it in all kinds of contexts, and for different effects, and it works great. It's like a rhetorical swiss army knife.

Moving on, talk about getting shafted! I'm glad my political gambling is a hobby, not an addiction, cuz Cheeto Mussolini just fucked me out of 5K. Although I'm even more glad of my Senate side bet since it helps take the sting out of it.

Congratulations to all the Republicans out there! It's been exhausting work pretending to care about the deficit, unemployment numbers, and whether or not the rest of the world thinks the US is a laughingstock, so I'm sure you'll all be glad for the break.

Last but not least, commiserations to all the kids out there, the ones who'll get punched repeatedly in the face as they struggle through life because global warming as a solvable problem is gone for at least a generation, whilst us Boomers and Gen Xers get to pop our clogs before the really bad shit starts. Time to start volunteering for those Mars missions, I guess.

For any non-Yanks out there, there is a small silver lining: Between, incompetence, corruption, and taking advantage of these historic circumstances to finally bury the Dem party forever, the incoming administration may be too busy trying to fuck over the US to have any time to fuck over the rest of the planet any more than they have already have. Fingers crossed!

Not that having a spinal column was ever a regular feature of your average politician, but the absolute cluelessness of major UK political figures in the last couple of days is stunning. As far as I can tell, only Nicola Sturgeon has managed to avoid dumping large amounts of shit on herself.

Personally, I lay a lot of the blame at Tony Blair's feet. If he'd hadn't been such a mendacious prick, most of the current crop of British pols wouldn't even exist today.

The base's grateful anointing of Trump in the last few weeks has been hilarious. I won't deny that, unlike pretty much anyone else, he really knows how to hit those sweet rhetorical spots, but this idea that he's the right man for the right job at the right time is grade-A bullshit.

Trump is going to be the Republican nominee not because he's awesome, but because everybody else failed hard. For starters, the perennial no-hoper contingent was the biggest ever this cycle with Jindal, Pataki, Graham, Fiorina, Gilmore, Huckabee, Carson, Paul, Christie and Perry. That's ten fucking useless candidates, there only to boost their speaking fees and maybe snag a cushy cabinet slot. I'll grant that, statistically, they probably had little to no effect on vote totals, but they certainly added to the circus atmosphere. In any other year, Trump would have been an early casualty, but with these idiots, as they slowly got ground out of the process, he got to hang on and look a little better by comparison.

Then you've got the big hitters, every single one of which failed miserably. We should be watching either Scott Walker or Ted Cruz laying into Hillary right now, but Walker proved to be such an embarrassment of a candidate that he made Rick Perry's 2012 run look good. Cruz, darling of the base, the most conservative politician on the Hill, apparently couldn't get his hands on that software upgrade that makes you behave like an actual human being.

And there's Jeb and Marco, different generations of beloved establishment candidates who apparently took all their campaigning cues from Scott Walker. I never thought the establishment candidates had as much of a chance this year as most did, but one of them at least should have ended up in the final two, not flame out spectacularly.

Let me put it this way: If a minor league ballplayer comes to Yankee stadium and homers all night, that's a big fucking deal. If, instead, he spanks the shit out of a little league team, we call a guy like that a douchebag, not a winner.

Son, if you can't keep Marco Rubio, of all people, more than 5 points away in Iowa, of all places, you do not have what it takes. Go home.

Alright folks, now that the writing is on the wall, let's place our bets on Trump's demise. I'm thinking he's in until at least Super Tuesday. Maybe the better question is, how much more damage is he going to do before that?

Welp, looks like the Benghazi/Emailgate scandal is done with, seeing as all the right wing noise machines have shifted over to their new tactic to derail the Clinton campaign.

Can you guess what they think will do the trick this time?

That's right kids, it's Bill Clinton's sex life!

Apparently, his peccadilloes, insufficient to stop him being elected in '92 and re-elected in '96, not to mention boring enough to not warrant impeachment in '98, are the new secret weapon that's going to wipe Hillary off the face of the earth. One of the arguments brought up on Hannity's radio show yesterday, and I shit you not, was that we hadn't had a solid discussion of Billo's improprieties in a good long while, so it would be nice and fresh to exhume, particularly for millennials.

I mean, I can kinda see the logic here. Feminism (and the public perception thereof), has come a ways since those flannel and coffee days of yore, so why not see if we can round up a new jury, re-litigate, and get a different result?

Now, quite apart from the fact that Hillary is not Bill, there are at least three serious flaws with this plan: Number one, you have a lot of room for unforced errors. If you fuck up even slightly (or hell, if her campaign is the least bit competent), she can ju-jitsu this shit in a heartbeat to her benefit.

Second, the voters who are actually the target of this strategy, independents and women, aren't going to overwhelmingly switch away from her in disgust because they were previously unaware that her husband's a bit of a creep.

Lastly, the very specific people you're trying to agitate with this are the people you happily and routinely make fun of: College kids, feminists, SJWs, and most of Tumblr. I'm not going to claim that any of these groups are super-smart, but they're smart enough to see through that kind of concern trolling.